Green: It was a mad 20 minutes against Carlisle

Mike Simmonds

Crestfallen Town winger Danny Green labelled his side’s capitulation against Carlisle United on Tuesday night as a ‘mad 20 minutes’.

The hosts should have had the points sewn up when Green was on target after 57 minutes to put Luton 3-1 in front.

“Some of the goals in the second half just looked so easy, just looked like they rolled in.”

Danny Green

But Carlisle scored three times in 14 minutes to stun Kenilworth Road as a clearly frustrated Green said: “I haven’t played in many of those games, when you’re 3-1 up and they score, so it gets a bit jittery, a bit shaky.

“I just think it’s a mad 20 minutes and we’re coming off with a loss now, because of a mad 20 minutes.

“I’m devastated, I thought we were cruising in the game. They caused us a few problems but nothing really to worry about.

“At 3-1 up, we were playing some really nice football and looked dangerous on the counter attack, so to come in and lose 4-3 is just devastating.

“This is the worst way to lose a game. They make a couple of substitutes, pushing three boys upfront, and it’s back to the wall, you don’t know what’s hit you really and you’re 4-3 down.”

Like manager John Still, Green highlighted the defensive inadequacies on the night and knows viewing the match again at training will be an uncomfortable experience.

He continued: “We’ve got to look at ourselves as a team collectively, not just the defenders, we’ve got to defend as a team.

“We do defending every day, attack versus defence, so we should have shut out shop a little bit.

“Some of the goals in the second half just looked so easy, just looked like they rolled in sometimes.

“(Derek) Asamoah’s come in and hit a shot into the corner, we’ve got to defend that a bit better. Even the Jabo (Ibehre) one, it’s fallen to him, no-one’s on him in the box, we’ve got to look at that.

“We’re bitterly disappointed as a team, defensive-wise it’s not good enough.

“We’ve got to put it down as one of those nights and move on very quickly from it.

“We’ll go back on Thursday and watch the video, it won’t be nice, people will probably get picked out and it won’t be great viewing, but it’s got to be done.

“People have got to learn from it and we’ve got to learn from it for as a team.”

Green didn’t put the blame at centre half Mark O’Brien’s door though after he replaced Luke Wilkinson who was out with a thigh injury, as Luton looked a shadow of the side who had kept three successive clean sheets in the league.

He added: “It’s tough for OB to come in as he hasn’t played for a while, but he’s a top centre half.

“He’s played for Derby and played for Motherwell, so he knows the role, I just think as a team, we weren’t great defensively.

“We pressed really well first half and maybe we were a little bit tired from that. We were told to high press them as they like to play out from the back, so I don’t know if we played into their hands a little bit.

“I thought we dealt with them well, just the last 20 minutes, where they broke away, we’ve got to give them credit as well.

“They’ve come here and done a job on us. Being 3-1 up, there’s no way they should have got back in the game, so fair does to them.”